You can say it's not value destruction, but it's all least value transfer. My $1000 that I saved last year won't buy as much now as it would then. The value I have lost maybe now exists in the pocket of some government employee or central banker, so OK it wasn't destroyed. But I no longer control it.

Fiat (and Bitcoin) inflation devalues saver holdings to the benefit of the people who get the newly created money.


No. It devalues each unit of the coin, but each (staking) holder gains units to compensate for that devaluation, resulting in 0% net value loss.


Suppose you have 100 CLAM and the price is 0.01 BTC per CLAM. You have 1 BTC worth of CLAM.

Suppose staking doubles your holding each year and halves the price each year.

By the end of the year, you'll have 200 CLAM and the price is 0.05 BTC per CLAM. You still have 1 BTC worth of CLAM.

You can cry that the price of CLAM in BTC has halved, but who cares? You still have 1 BTC worth of it, so it doesn't matter.

The only person complain is the guy who didn't bother staking for that year. He still has 100 CLAM, but now it's only worth 0.5 BTC. That's the incentive to stake.

Good point. We don't know that the digger is dumping at all.

We do know that all the coins he digs go to poloniex, and then most go to JD.

We can't tell the difference between:

  1) digger deposits to poloniex and sells CLAMs to JD investor; JD investor withdraws CLAMs to JD

  2) digger deposits to poloniex and then withdraws CLAMs to JD; the poloniex step is purely to obfuscate the link between him and his JD account

Either way, the money supply is being massively diluted by digging, and the price is dropping.

There is no question that someone with access to a lot of old BTC private keys is systematically digging and dumping distribution CLAMs. He is doing it in reverse order of the block the outputs were created in, just to be sure we know it's a single entity doing it.


I can try to convince you of the timescales. At 2015-11-13 22:51:23 the digger dug the following addresses: [x9NXaGSz] [xA9338mM] [xPWEDmTS] [xEZKQHEU] [xPosuwLa] [xNNwmVoL] [xXL7bZ5s], all of which were funded in block 5763. Click each link and check which block the addresses were funded in, and which block they were emptied in. Before that he was working on block 5764, and so on back up to the newest distribution block. If you were to dig from block 9999 back to block 5764, you would have dug 38.32% of all the distribution CLAMs. Since the whale digger's CLAMs are uniformly distributed through the initial distribution we can say with pretty good certainty that he is around 38% of the way through digging the wallet he's currently working on.

This chart shows global digging (click to enlarge):



The 'whale digger' started around Aug 21st, so it has taken him 3 months to dig 200k, representing 38% of his wallet, but note that after the first 10 days or so he slowed down a lot. In the last 77 days he has dug 135k, representing 25.8% of his wallet. Since he has 100-38.32 = 61.68% left to dig of the current wallet, and he's digging 25.8/77 = 0.335% of his wallet per day, the remaining 61.68% should take him 184 days, or 6 more months.

And that's just for the wallet he's currently digging through. We don't know if he has others. We do know that the wallet he's digging represents something like 3 to 5% of all the distribution CLAMs and so it is entirely possible that there are 10 more out there of the same size or bigger.


I have stopped buying CLAMs. It makes no sense to buy them when the price is going nowhere but down. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I'm sure that stopping the digger would stop the downward price pressure and remove the only reason I and others stopped buying CLAMs.

Price is a function of supply and demand. The price adjusts until the supply at that price is equal to the demand at that price.


Can you expand on that? If it's not bad, how can it be too much? Since it theoretically has no net effect on the value of your holdings what does it matter how high the staking reward is?

I just spent a few hours away from the computer thinking about things, and came to the same conclusion myself. There's no reason to switch from CLAM to the new coin when we can accept both at the same time. That way people get to lose their balance twice!

The Just-Dice codebase isn't set up to handle multiple currencies, but I can simply run two different instances like I did with the original Just-Dice and Doge-Dice sites.

What is "the stake problem"? I don't see any problem with staking. It is a fair way of rewarding those who help secure the network, at the expense of those who decide not to.

I'm not sure whether the "fuck you, don't answer my posts" clause is still in effect. I'll err on the side of caution and disregard them until I hear differently.

In so far as the digger is dumping and forcing the price down, yes.

I'm not sure you meant "staking" there, since it doesn't make much sense. Staking happens once per minute, by design, whoever is digging, dumping, or whatever else.


I really do think that if the rules were changed to stop new CLAMs being dug up then there would be less supply, more demand, and an increase in price. I'm surprised you don't. As I understand it, nobody is claiming that stopping the digging wouldn't cause the price to rise. The objection is only whether it is fair to do such a thing.


I think the concern is that we don't have two or three years. If the price continues dropping for another year will anyone still be interested in the coin? There are hundreds if not thousands of dead altcoins out there which would be staking nicely if only anyone could be bothered to still have the wallet running.


This seems to be a common misconception:

"Staking is like inflation, and inflation is bad"

We feel that inflation is bad, because in the fiat world we put $1000 in a savings account, earn 2% interest on it, but in the mean time the money supply has been inflated 10% by quantitative easing. Our $1002 now has less buying power than it had before. It is a smaller percentage of the total money supply.

This is even true with PoW coins like DogeCoin. Miners get to earn block rewards forever. We buy a million DOGE, save it, and every day our million DOGE represents a smaller and smaller percentage of the money supply.

However! For PoS coins this isn't the case. We buy 1000 CLAMs, and it's 0.1% of the 1 million total money supply, say. If there's no digging, and only staking, then a year later another 500k CLAMs have been staked. But we have staked 500 of that 500k, since we are 0.1% of the staking weight. So now we have 1500 of the 1.5 million supply, and still have 0.1% of the total money supply. Sure, assuming a constant market cap the price will have decreased by 50%, but our holdings have increased by 50% too, so our net worth in CLAM has remained constant.

In this way staking is NOT the same as the inflation we see in USD, BTC, or DOGE, since the newly created coins are shared out to existing holders in proportion to their holdings.


but it shouldn't. Staking is "running to stay still". The only people you will be overtaking are those who aren't running (staking). I mean, staking isn't some magic wealth creation system. If everyone is staking, where does all that extra value come from? It doesn't. It increases the money supply while decreasing the per-unit value of that supply.

I decided to reply to each post in a separate post to make it easier for people to reply to me. Let me know if it looks too spammy and I'll go back to single large mega-replies...


The act of importing an old BTC wallet into your CLAM client doesn't cause any effect at all on the blockchain or CLAM p2p network. We just can't tell how many CLAMs have been dug up.

The first we know about a dig is when the digger first stakes or spends his 4.6 CLAM output.

That "first stake or spend" is the act we are talking about changing the rules for.

So yes, it's possible that you imported your old BTC wallet a year ago, found 10 funded addresses and now have a balance of 46 CLAMs which you have never staked or spent.

If we voted to "stop all digging", one day you would upgrade your wallet software and see that your balance went from 46 to 0 with the upgrade, since the new version of the software would no longer recognise any old 4.6 output that hadn't moved yet.


I agree, but continuing digging does the same. The constant dilution of the money supply and the associated downward pressure on the price makes CLAM an unattractive asset to hold. It appears to be a lose/lose decision. Either we violate the sanctity of the initial distribution and change the rules, or we watch the coin's value diluted closer and closer to zero.


Huh, that's what 'smooth' said in the previous post too.

Is it nuts? It seems we have two very different groups here - those who want the initial rules kept, and those who want a coin they can hold for value. Perhaps we can only satisfy both groups by having two very different coins?

So we have two main camps here. Exaggerating the positions, we have:

Camp A: wants to leave everything how it is so it's fair for future diggers. It's not OK to cancel their free CLAMs. The stakeholders knew massive digging was a risk and accepted it. They hoped it wouldn't happen but it did. Suck it up.

Camp B: bought into CLAM and saw the price drop. To fix this, let's ban digging. Then the price can recover and we can all get rich.

Sure there are shades of grey between these extremes, involving halvenings and such like, but let's ignore those for now.

You're proposing a third camp:

Camp C: It's not fair to change the CLAM rules, but it's OK to make a new coin, let's call it doogcoin. We use a variant of the CLAM distribution method: everyone who held non-distribution CLAM outputs at lunchtime yesterday can use their CLAM private key to claim their doogcoins. Just-Dice stops using CLAM and starts using doogcoin. The CLAM rules are unchanged, everyone can keep digging their CLAM, so everyone's happy, right?

Anyone who wants digging to stop switches to doogcoin. Presumably JD switches to doogcoin too. I guess most CLAM holders dump their CLAM to buy more doogcoin. CLAM price goes to 0, doogcoin price goes to the moon. Is that the correct outcome? Is that what you're proposing?

What do people think of this "Camp C" option?

It seems like would satisfy both Camp A (since we're not changing the rules of CLAM, like they want) and Camp B (since it gives them a way of holding their value without being diluted by future diggers). Did I miss anything?

I was staking ~500 blocks per day, or around 30% of the network total. I had my fair share of big wins, but the majority of stakes were 0.1 CLAMs. During the lottery staking the average stake size was lower than the current 1 CLAM per block.


Staking is a way of keeping up with inflation. To get a percentage of the CLAM supply you dig it or buy it. On average, staking doesn't change your percentage of the supply unless other holders fall behind by not staking.


I only had a single wallet. I no longer stake my own wallet. I have my CLAMs invested at Just-Dice where I have a minority share of the pool. So no, once I introduced CLAM to a much wider audience I wasn't able to keep staking 500 CLAMs per day. My percentage of the money supply has been steadily falling.


No. Google asks me "Did you mean: cryptocat" so I guess it isn't a widely used term.

I see you sent me more "news" this morning after I asked you to stop:


That's clearly an ad, not "news".

I'm asking again, politely, for you to stop emailing your ads to people who have never had any interaction with you or your company.

Thank you.

Did I read right that I have to lose with quad jacks or better to qualify, and both I and the guy who beats me have to use both our hole cards?

And when that happens, who gets paid? Just the guy who suffered the bad beat? Or does everyone in the hand get some?

How about having the 'unfold' round be like any other betting round, only open to those who folded pre-flop, where the min-bet is the size of the pre-flop pot, and where everyone has to put the same in to unfold.

So players A, B, C all fold pre-flop. The pot is of size 'p'. The flop hits them all a bit, player A puts in 'p' chips to unfold, player B raises the unfold bet to '3p', player C decides not to unfold. Now it's up to player A to either call the extra 2p to match player B's 3p, give up the 'p' chips he already put in, and stay folded, or raise further. Eventually everyone has put in the same amount or dropped out of the betting, and the flop betting round can begin.

All the players who didn't fold pre-flop get to enjoy a much bigger pot thanks to A and B's betting war, at no cost to themselves other than the fact that A and B probably now have made hands.

OK, I see what he's saying: stopping the lottery reduced the reward from 1000 CLAMs to 1 CLAM per block, so that means the lottery system was like a pre-mine.

Maybe this chart can help show the reality of the situation. Pay attention to how the green supply curve changed when the lottery staking system ended on October 25th last year:



Hint: stopping the lottery caused the supply to increase much more quickly than before.

If he spent more time attempting to communicate his confused point and less time trying to think up new ways of insulting people's icing preferences we could have resolved this little misunderstanding much more quickly.

Sweet, thanks.


I think that's a fine FAQ answer, maybe linked to from the PF page.

I understand the need to be vigilant against collusion, but that should be an ongoing process; if you're only checking for collusion when a player decides to withdraw, you are doing a disservice to your other players.

Whether or not a player ever attempts to withdraw, you should be checking that his profits don't come from cheating. Because even if he ends up losing his ill-gotten gains back, he's unlikely to lose them to the same people he won them from.

Given this, I don't understand the need for a delay at withdrawal time. It's over 24 hours since I played poker. That's plenty of time for my account to have been reviewed for cheating, and marked as approved for an instant automated withdrawal. That way you don't need to increase your staff, since the system will process withdrawals automatically.


OK. I wasn't sure you had even noticed that I was still posting on that ticket. None of my last several replies have been acknowledged. I guess I was expecting a more rapid turnaround time, like I'm seeing here on the forum. Take your time.

It occurred to me (since this is the first thing listed on the provably fair page) that we can't be sure you're not keeping more than 10% of the sponsor money.

I see "Thanks to our sponsors for putting 0.17658 btc in this draw's pot!", but I can't tell how much each one paid you for you to arrive at that total. I expect I could go through the sponsorship pages one at a time (https://www.pevpot.com/sponsors/1, https://www.pevpot.com/sponsors/2, etc.) to check it but that's kind of a pain, especially as the total number of sponsorship pages grows.


Two things: it's not *every* satoshi. It's only the ones making up big-enough payments. There's a dust threshold.

And every one *is* given, not *are* given.

Point 5 is missing a trailing period.

Point 7: some people might not be happy signing a message saying something as ambiguous as "pevpot". It's best practice to be explicit about what a signed message is for. For example I might like to state that the signature is for the sole purpose of claiming a pevpot.com win, and is not to be considered as proof of ownership for any other purpose. Or words to that effect. Maybe you can allow the "purpose" field to be free text so long as the first 6 characters are "pevpot". Or maybe I'm just running out of nits to pick.

I had been hearing a lot about how withdrawals can take days or even weeks to complete, so I tried making one:



It took me 44 minutes to get around to confirming the withdrawal request, and then a further 38 minutes for the coins to reach my wallet. That's not too bad, all things considered. I've certainly seen faster (instant) withdrawals, but any withdrawal in less than an hour is tolerable.

Now if only they would reply to support tickets!

Edit: 90 seconds after posting this message they replied to my support ticket. It's a kind of magic!

I agree.

Also, the FAQ needs updating:

The post you linked to is where the devs turned off the exploitable 'lottery' staking system after discovering it was being exploited. At that point CLAM was very cheap and stayed so for another couple of months. Nobody had (or has) a strange hold on the coin supply. You can easily buy large numbers of CLAM on the open market.

As gaba says, the big increase in the price of CLAM corresponds directly with the launch of Just-Dice, and came 2 months after the hard fork you linked to.

I've no idea what an eduffield is, and suspect you are just trolling. But I thought I should point out the errors in your post anyway.


Of course. That's why I put it in quotes.


I guess you mean Creative or Xploited. Deb doesn't have anything to do with CLAM other than being a chat mod at Just-Dice.


We do have a notion of "the official CLAM website", "the CLAM github", and this "official CLAM thread", which is moderated by one of the creators of CLAM. Nobody is under any illusions about the transitory nature of such "officialdom". It's a consensus coin, and if the creators find themselves on the wrong side of the consensus then I'm sure they understand the implications. Perhaps it would be better not to use the O-word, but doing so doesn't change the reality of the situation.


Bitcoin's two forks are currently identical in terms of which blocks they accept and so there's no issue (yet). If someone was to create and publish a CLAM fork which refuses to accept any transactions that spend or stake an output from block 9999 or earlier (those being the initial distribution outputs) after block 730k (say) (that being a couple of days from now) then we end up with two incompatible chains very quickly. Poloniex will be running one fork, Cryptsy will be running the other, I'll be able to send my coins to both exchanges and sell them twice. That's more than just a theoretical issue.


Yes. Only allowing people who hold coins to vote about the future of the coin could be argued to be unfair to those who didn't yet discover the coin. But how else do we make it fair? There are billions of people who didn't discover the coin.

I saw an argument made recently that "I already sold my coins because the price keeps going down, so I wouldn't get a vote and that isn't fair". I would argue that if your solution to solving the problem caused by the massive inflationary pressure is to dump your coins onto others until the situation improves then you don't get to have a say in how to improve the situation. You've made it someone else's problem by selling your coins. Let those who bought them off you have their say, since they are directly involved in the outcome.


You sure know some good words. Thanks for posting some of them.


Who is it unfair to? The rules wouldn't change overnight. Anyone with coins to dig would have time to dig and secure them.


The group being benefited is "all CLAM holders". The group losing out is those who didn't bother claiming their free CLAMs in the 18 months that CLAM has been running. They either don't know or don't care about their free CLAM. Is it unfair to revoke the offer of free coins after a period of time?


The rules have changed several times already, so it's too late to hold them sacrosanct.


I think he's only trolling for attention, but even if the rate of staking did change that doesn't create a "strangle hold" on coin supply.

Staking rewards everyone equally and should drive down the price as it increases the supply. Buying X% of the coin supply should cost the same no matter what the staking return is.

I was going to address BAC's most recent posts today, but he has asked me not to, so I will respect his wishes.



I think it is a shame that he doesn't want to be involved in these discussions.